AT&T

Interactive Intelligence has a really interesting contest going on... Outrageous Interactions. The goal is to tell the most unusual but true call center story -- you know when a caller speaks with you and says something so amazing you can't wait to tell everyone you know. I knew someone once who worked as a directory assistance operator and boy did she have some good stories.

I have so much to write about today that I just don't have the time for separate blog entries so if you excuse me, here is a list of unrelated but important topics.

Spam Arrest

I get too much spam. I get thousands of emails a day and it is killing my productivity. I now have a challenge/response system on my email which means users have to prove they are humans before I get their emails. I also check a web interface to ensure I don't miss important emails but things got out of hand with all the spam and this new solution should help.

Text to Speech Gets New Voices

I had a recent meeting with Cepstral and they showed me demos of their service/software which provides a variety of voices for text to speech applications.

You might have thought there are enough word processors on the market and there is absolutely no reason for any company to go through the expense of developing a word processor when Microsoft owns the market and Google is coming on somewhat strong. If this was your thinking, you may not have heard the latest news.

You see, Adobe has been watching this competition from a short distance away and has subsequently decided they can do an even better job than Google in the desktop application business by bringing their knowledge of graphics to bear on their competitor from the world of search.

A sample Buzzword document which subscribers can access in read-only mode.

Witness the Adobe Buzzword Beta, a SaaS offering meant to compete with Google and Microsoft. I have had a chance to demo the word processor and am very impressed with the graphical capabilities it possesses.

Two days -- two shows, two cities and two trains which left at dawn. Wow... What a rush. What I picked up from the Channel Partners (Boston) and SpeechTek (New York) shows is the communications market and the call center market are doing well, based on what companies in the space tell me.

Yes, of course some sectors are doing better than others but some are amazingly strong...

What is the future of communications? One acknowledged thought leader in our field is Thomas Howe and his consulting company which bears his name is the place you go when you want to know. Howe and I were recently on a panel together at a conference in San francisco and I was very impressed with what he had to say so I invited him to be be my guest on a podcast.

Some of the takeaways from our discussion are that voice mashups are becoming more common and voice will transcend CEBP or communications enabled business processes to the realm of the consumer as well. As this happens, communications becomes the condiment to virtually all applications.

Behold the open source communications wars. In this corner weighing in at millions of downloads is Digium... A Huntsville, Alabama purveyor of all things Asterisk... From training to support to hardware, you name it.

In the other corner with decades of international experience and engineering and a strong alliance with IBM/Microsoft is Nortel/PingTel.

Last week we saw comments from Nortel on why they acquired PingTel and why this solution is better than the "old Asterisk".

One would imagine this comment was the straw that broke the camel's back:

As service providers look to upgrade their infrastructure and build new networks, they have many decisions to make. One of these has to do with the revenue producing applications which currently exist on their network. Do they all need to be rewritten to work with the new network?

In many cases they do but if one company has it's way this will no longer be the case. A company named AppTrigger is looking to bring the old applications into the new world of next-generation networks while simultaneously allowing many of the next-gen services to be available to subscribers on legacy networks.

Without listing them all as their are too many, the recent outages of services from Amazon, Google and many others have people worrying about switching to hosted applications and moreover, some jobs may be at risk over decisions to go hosted.

Remember the good old days when no one got fired for buying IBM. Seems like the saying still goes for Microsoft and other non-hosted vendors.

For hosted providers, the tide is turning and if these companies don't get their collective act together, they will ensure a slower migration to software as a service or SaaS.

The problem is of course that a single hosting company having an outage such as SalesForce.com, Google or Amazon will scare potential customers away from even considering the move to servers which they do not control.

Sure the infrequent outage isn't a problem but we seem to be hitting a critical mass of these things and there is a record number of outages and worse -- record numbers of stories about hosted service outages.

Let's just say it seems like the SaaS space may soon take a pause if these outages don't stop soon.

The much anticipated Google Android phone looks like it will finally see the light of day on the T-Mobile network. It is worth noting that some of the more interesting developments in the world of mobile phones have come from traditional computer companies. First, HTC a company known for making really leading-edge PDAs around the turn of the century got into the smartphone business and provided a solid alternative to traditional cell phone makers and phone from Treo/Palm/RIM (all three of which could be considered computer companies as well).

Then it was Apple and now Google. (I may lump Samsung in here as well but let's leave them out for now.